A request for more visible activity from the moderator team

Question

Before I start this let me point out the following: This isn't a post to draw hate towards the moderator team, it is to try and reach out to them to get them re-involved with the community again.

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In this previous meta discussion about the moderator team two conclusions appear to have been made:

• "Something should be done" - The majority of the community.
• "Nothing should be done, we're fiiiine" - The moderator team.

Now I was watching this discussion, and was involved in it, quite heavily and I continued to monitor events after it too. Here is my summary of what appears to have happened during the aftermath.

• All of the moderators suddenly emerged from the cracks (make of this what you will)
• Flag handling times were quick and edits/comments and other visible things from the moderator team improved (barely but it's a start)
• ~2-3 days later this died down to almost nothing again
• In the next few weeks moderator only flags seemed to take ~5 hours on average to handle (based off experience and mainly comment flags so adjust the average accordingly)
• Flag handling times last week seem to have stabilised again at ~2 hours (again based off of the above)

However, visible activity by the team has again fallen and we're once again left wondering "Where are the mods?"

Now I wasn't going to point fingers in this post but I think it's important to look at the two moderators who appear to be at either end of the spectrum:

• Rand al'Thor: Is around every day, reviews, edits, comments, is active on meta, is active in chat
• Thaddeus Howze: Was last seen May 31^st

Rand is a good example of what we want a moderator to be doing, visibly moderating the site and leading by example. Thaddeus hasn't been seen at all and is a poor example of someone even interested in the site never mind moderating it.

So, what do I think would be a good step? More visible moderation activity. (Not in any particular order, just how they popped into my mind)

• Edit posts
• Be active (i.e. log in to the site)
• Comment
• Handle flags and other moderator only business (obviously not exactly visible and should go without saying)
• Active on meta
• Active in chat
• Review (not necessarily important but if one is sitting there for a while and the community hasn't handled it why not handle it?)
• Delete low quality, R/A and spam posts (only >10k users can see this)
• etc.

All of this tells the community you are still alive and kicking and keeps our faith in you. You were elected to moderate and lead this community, please reward us with your continued effort in it.

Answer 1

OK, since you want to toss this can around again, let's have a look at your claims:

In this previous meta discussion about the moderator team two conclusions appear to have been made:

"Something should be done" - The majority of the community. "Nothing should be done, we're fiiiine" - The moderator team.

Kevin's answer in the linked post currently stands at +46/-13 = 33 votes. This means that a total of 59 people voted for it. The top voted answer on the other side is at +31/-14 = 17. This means a total of 45 people voted for it. This site has 1,260 users with more than 1k rep. Therefore, the idea that either position espoused on the linked meta post reflects the "majority of the community" is ludicrous. That the one with fewer votes and fewer positive votes reflects the views of said majority is even more so.

In the next few weeks moderator only flags seemed to take ~5 hours on average to handle (based off experience and mainly comment flags so adjust the average accordingly)

First of all, a 5h average handling time is absolutely fine. I am having a very hard time believing that you honestly think a change from 5h to 2h is somehow important or even relevant. Sites that actually do have the sort of mod issues you think SFF has can take days for flags, not just a few hours.

Then, you list various things you think a mod should be doing:

• Edit posts
• Be active (i.e. log in to the site)
• Comment
• Handle flags and other moderator only business (obviously not exactly visible and should go without saying)
• Active on meta
• Active in chat
• Review (not necessarily important but if one is sitting there for a while and the community hasn't handled it why not handle it?)
• (20k only): Delete low quality, R/A and spam posts
• etc.

Of these, you are of course completely correct that it is a mod's job to handle flags and be active on the site's meta. I will also grant you that it is indeed important for mods to log into the site relatively often so they can keep abreast of whatever is going on. That, however, doesn't mean that mods can't take a holiday and come back after a while. This isn't a job, and even jobs let you take time off!

That said, of the 5 moderators this site has, all but one have been seen in the past 24 hours and all of them have been seen in the past month. So they're here. And active. Perhaps not as much as you are, but there's nothing wrong with that. Moderating can be surprisingly draining. Especially on the more drama-prone sites.

Now, you claim that the average flag handling times on SFF are ~5h. As I said before, if that's true, then the mods are doing a pretty good job! However, you really have no way of knowing. Even if you took the trouble to look at your past N flags and when they were handled and taken the average (and if you did, you should add it to the question to show that you actually have some evidence and aren't just throwing random numbers around), even if you did do that, that would still not indicate anything about the overall handling time. Some flags are much easier to deal with than others.

As for meta participation, the most active meta user on the site is a moderator. However, it does indeed look as though the other mods aren't that active on meta. I don't know if that's a problem. The mod team is a team for a reason. Not everyone needs to do everything, so maybe they leave the meta work to Rand. Still, if you feel that some of the mods aren't getting involved enough in meta discussions, then maybe you could bring that up. Ideally, in a less confrontational manner, and see if the community wants to touch on that.

None of the other points you make are mod jobs, however. Mods do not need to be active on chat (chat is not what we do here, this is a Q&A site that happens to have some associated chat rooms). Mods do not need to edit, or post. Why should they? Why would you want your moderators to take over the tasks that the community can do? That's the whole idea of "community moderation". Mods should only step in for things the community cannot do and always allow the community to deal with as much as possible..

In fact, if mods were to start doing most of the things you mention instead of waiting for the community to handle them and only stepping in if the community doesn't, then I would expect people to start complaining about power abuse and petty dictators shaping the site to fit their fancy. And people would be right. It isn't a mod's job to deal with things that can be dealt with by users.

Answer 2

I think it's worth pointing out here that the most active moderator on this site by far... Isn't a person. It's a group!

Over the past year, only about 20% of moderation actions here have been performed by the elected moderators; the vast bulk of the work is being done by folks like you, the overall moderation cost of the system amortized across thousands of teeny-tiny slices of effort contributed by regular, everyday users - exactly as it should be for a mature site such as this one.

Of course... This makes it a lot harder to satisfy a call for action such as the one you raise; more verbosity from one or two or five people with diamonds next to their name doesn't really do much when 4/5ths of the moderation involves someone else.

But that's no reason not to try! You can lead by example: four out of the last five questions you voted to close have no comment from you; you could certainly provide a bit more guidance to folks asking off-topic questions, providing a template for others on how to visibly guide new users in the process. Ditto for edits: you're a pretty good editor, and often try to rescue problematic questions with helpful revisions - but rarely do I see you offering specific guidance to the author in the process. Again here, a few notes on what your edit is accomplishing could set an example for other editors, not to mention the author themselves - teach a man to fish & all that...

Of course, this isn't all on you. Anyone reading this would do well to consider how their own small part in moderating the site could be improved.

I'll leave you with some gratuitous numbers...

Appendix: moderation stats

Here's a breakdown of moderation activity over the past 365 days:

Action                                  Moderators Community¹ 
--------------------------------------- ---------- --------- 
Users suspended²                              11          7  
Users destroyed                              242          0  
Users deleted                                 22          0  
Users contacted                               32          0  
User banned from review                        1          0  
Tasks reviewed³: Suggested Edit queue         75       5355  
Tasks reviewed: Reopen Vote queue             94       2838  
Tasks reviewed: Low Quality Posts queue      238       8851  
Tasks reviewed: Late Answer queue             96       3476  
Tasks reviewed: First Post queue             150       8267  
Tasks reviewed: Close Votes queue            102       7866  
Tags merged                                   35          0  
Tag synonyms proposed                         14          2  
Tag synonyms created                          15          2  
Questions unprotected                          1         11  
Questions reopened                           113        234  
Questions protected                           56        342  
Questions migrated                            23          5  
Questions merged                               6          0  
Questions flagged⁴                             5       1480  
Questions closed                             157       2082  
Question flags handled⁴                      448       1037  
Posts unlocked                                 5         26  
Posts undeleted                               54        142  
Posts locked                                  14        239  
Posts deleted⁵                              1294       3134  
Posts bumped                                   0        766  
Escalations to the CM team                     7          0  
Comments undeleted                           167          0  
Comments flagged                               3       4348  
Comments deleted⁶                           6765       6358  
Comment flags handled                       3083       1268  
Answers flagged                               47       7851  
Answer flags handled                        3254       4644  
All comments on a post moved to chat          86          0 

Footnotes

¹ "Community" here refers both to the membership of Science Fiction and Fantasy Stack Exchange without diamonds next to their names, and to the automated systems otherwise known as user #-1 - a system process that operates based on votes, views, reviews and other heuristics.

² The system will suspend users under three circumstances: when a user is recreated after being previously suspended, when a user is recreated after being destroyed for spam or abuse, and when a network-wide suspension is in effect on an account.

³ This counts every review that was submitted (not skipped) - so the 2 suggested edits reviews needed to approve an edit would count as 2, the goal being to indicate the frequency of moderation actions. This also applies to flags, etc.

⁴ Includes close flags (but not close or reopen votes).

⁵ This ignores a good chunk of deletions that happen automatically in response to some other action.

⁶ This includes comments deleted by their own authors (which also account for some number of handled comment flags).

Answer 3

I must say that I disagree with most of your "activity" points, for a couple of reasons.

1. I'm on record for many years as arguing against excessive moderator activity.

   • Binding votes are bad. Many reasons (rehashed on Meta before).

   • Nothing worse than expressing your point on Meta, only for a mod to come in, and destroy your argument not because you are wrong, but because a diamond publicly opposed you (as clearly seen in voting patterns on the Meta post before and after Moderator post - I have experienced this). While this happened occasionally with regular users posting things too - duh, I have plenty of bad ideas and suck at articulating good ones - it never had either the frequency OR the magnitude of the effect when a mod does it. I often vote-win Meta contests of ideas against answers by other users, and don't think I ever won one against moderators.

2. More objectively, there's only so much effort a moderation team can put in (especially when some members are... ahem... how do I put it gently... less engaged?).

   As such, I'd rather see them expend that rare currency on human exception handling (which is moderator's main job description), rather than actions regular community users can easily do.

   And since there has been a marked improvement in moderation team quality of recent, I'd rather not lead them to be burnt out.

Answer 4

One of my personal concerns is that several of our moderators don't seem to be following one of the main precepts of the "Theory of Moderation" (the rules that are supposed to guide how Stack Exchange volunteer moderators comport themselves), specifically point #3

Whenever possible, try to leave frequent comments on posts where you’ve taken (or considered taking) a moderator action, explaining the reasoning. This is important so that community members can learn the norms of the community and the moderation policies.

Rand Al'Thor has confirmed that two of the site's mods (Kevin and Thaddeus) are doing moderator things in the background but we can see from their activity logs that they aren't leaving frequent (or indeed any) comments to explain the actions they've taken.

Rand: Kevin and Thaddeus aren't so chatty as me. Does that make them less effective as moderators? ... They can still (e.g.) delete posts and comments, and have been doing so.

The fact that they've haven't posted a single comment to explain their actions for months is troubling.

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What can we do about this?

The short answer is nothing. If the mods say that they're acting appropriately then there's no way of determining if this is true or not. That being said, the (available) evidence is worrying.

What can they do about this?

Comment occasionally. Remind us that you exist and make sure when you take an action that you also leave a comment to explain what happened and why.